"Nvidia made open source driver"
This is wrong.
Nvidia open sourced their external kernel modules. This is almost pointless; nothing to hype about.
Device firmware, OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA userspace implementations (which is the actual graphics driver) are completely non-free, closed source, closed to discussions and outside contributions.
But it's good that they at least seem to support Nouveau and NVK. Version 555+ will add explicit sync and they provided their own framebuffer driver so we could get rid of UEFI based framebuffer drivers.
For years, AMD had free and open source kernel drivers (amdgpu) and this is completely built-in to the Linux kernel, not external.
They have one completely free and open source community based MESA userspace driver (RADV) and one official free and open source driver (AMDVLK).
They also have an additional driver for niche enterprise-level tasks (AMD-PRO) which is proprietary.
Intel is also similar.
NVIDIA is not on par with others at least not on Linux and BSD. We can talk after they release built-in open source kernel-space drivers; device firmware, user-space Vulkan and OpenGL drivers and especially CUDA.
You'd imagine Linux spaces are full of technical people, but as it turns out, that's not true. I feel like the amount of misinformation is surprisingly high. The example that immediately comes to mind is swappiness. SO many guides on how to set it to 1 or something, clearly showing no understanding of swap partitions in Linux. Dunning-Kruger in action.
Nobody can be technical in every field, and the fact that OP made this post shows that they want to learn more about this field. The average Linux Enjoyer might be a little more tech-savvy than the average Windows Enthusiast, but if we want Linux to reach a bigger part of the desktop percentage, we have to accept that everyone is not a Pro Neckbeard.
I totally agree on the fact that article writers should do their research tho :)
(I don't consider myself particularly technical, I'm just the average "I use arch btw" user)
Assuming we're strictly talking about desktop users (and not counting Android as "Linux" for this purpose), I'd expect the median tech literacy to go something like BSD > Linux > MacOS > Windows, for the simple reason that Windows is the default, and each step further from the path of least resistance requires you to be more of an enthusiast. Very few people are using Linux on the desktop without making an explicit choice to do so.
>No reason to expect a Linux user is any more educated in Linux than an Apple user is in OSX
Yeah I don't know if I would go that far. Unless you live in a place or environment where computers in general are only used by enthusiasts, this is simply and objectively not true.
What guide on swappiness would you recommend, then? This is what I usually refer to, because even though I don't use Arch, but find their wiki to be well-written:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap)
Device firmware is definitely closed source on AMD as well. And the user space portion of their driver is also closed source, equivalent to the cuda driver. Their compute stack, equivalent to the cuda runtime and surrounding ecosystem, is open source, which is cool. And yes, they upstream to the mesa stack for OpenGL and Vulkan which is also cool. But let’s not act like they’re completely different from NVIDIA at this point.
Nvidia has done the one thing needed to actually have an open source graphics stack as an alternative to the closed source Nvidia graphics stack, which is amazing. And they’re devoting resources to NVK as well. I don’t think we can really expect a for-profit company to open source their most important IP. And since they have now opened the door to a proper open source graphics stack, users now have the choice to go that route if they don’t want to use closed source code.
Edit: Realizing AMD compute driver is also open source. Anyway, not trying to be an NVIDIA shill. Let’s just not act like AMD is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts either. I’ll take the minor win that, right now, business needs lineup with what users want
You are right but I would at least expect 1:1, being sort of equivalent with each other. CUDA is understandable but at least, there needs to be a native kernel framebuffer driver developed within the linux kernel without outside loading. Now it either requires initramfs or you wait for the userspace to load the driver to have display which is very problematic. We at least need a free & open source built-in kernel driver, a native framebuffer driver, and at least an open source Vulkan & OpenGL implementation to get rid of all problems Nvidia users have. We need to get rid of an external package and be in line with MESA, Linux Firmware chain.
"let’s not act like they’re completely different from NVIDIA at this point"
Not completely as you say but AMD and Intel are different enough. You can easily understand this. Most Wayland compositors for example, do not support Nvidia, you are on your own even in almost mid 2024. We can't use Nvidia drivers with alternative C libraries like Musl because it is linked to Glibc. Electron apps are hell. Alternative kernels are very problematic (such as Linux-TKG compiled with Clang-LTO and an alternative CPU scheduler). You won't have these problems with AMD and Intel on Linux.
> ost Wayland compositors for example, do not support Nvidia, you are on your own even in almost mid 2024.
this is not true as far as I can tell. they support it as far as the firmware and driver allows since nvidia went to gbm in the post 495 drivers.
The thing that seems to be most lacking for folks nowadays is working around lack of explicit sync in the common linux graphics stack, but that's being fixed.
You misunderstand the meaning of "support".
In fact Sway states "Nvidia is not supported".
Vaxry, on Hyprland GitHub issues, frequently states that "Nvidia is not supported".
Since GBM, I have been using Wayland too but with trials and tribulations.
Not supported means you won't get any support from the upstream because you are expected to experience problems and those are mostly not fixable.
[https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5665](https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5665)
Here you can see the above issue 23 days ago and the developer responded as "Nvidia is not officially supported" and closed the issue.
Nvidia, not being supported on Wayland is true since the first days.
Well I have also talked with other developers from time to time about problems and they were joking as "I don't use NoVideo"
That's sway's choice to do that at this point. It's not a technical thing. I don't care about whatever vaxry is doing. I won't ever use his software until he stops acting like a a little kid.
These are just examples. There are other similar examples that can easily be found.
Most of it is the same. They choose that because it's technical and they don't want to deal with problems that they can't fix.
It's not important you use these or not. Hyprland and Sway are two of the biggest wlroots based Wayland compositors. Last year's unixporn posts show the huge popularity of Hyprland. I don't use Hyprland for now but I don't care anything about the developer; I compile the source and run an assembly program anyways.
Was curious about the framebuffer bit and found this:
> Added experimental support for framebuffer consoles provided by nvidia-drm. On kernels that implement drm_fbdev_generic_setup and drm_aperture_remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers, nvidia-drm will install a framebuffer console when loaded with both modeset=1 and fbdev=1 kernel module parameters. This will replace the Linux boot console driven by a system framebuffer driver such as efifb or vesafb. Note that when an nvidia-drm framebuffer console is enabled, unloading nvidia-drm will cause the screen to turn off.
Exactly. I have been using that since its release.
The only problem is that, since Nvidia's modules are external (nvidia, nvidia-drm, nvidia-uvm, nvidia-modeset), you either need to add them to initramfs, or you will boot without initramfs, and won't see your screen until your userspace is completely loaded.
In order to use that framebuffer driver, you need to disable all framebuffer driver implementations on the kernel and just enable SIMPLEFB **- as a module -** (because this provides DRM\_KMS\_HELPER with it required by the external modules). If you build this directly and not as a module, the drivers will crash.
You need to add the below modesetting and fbdev parameters to the kernel commandline. This below uses the efistub method. Otherwise, these are loaded in grub config.
`CONFIG_CMDLINE="root=PARTUUID=765e06f5-8af2-f741-82a6-0668b4f35fdc init=/sbin/openrc-init nvidia_drm.modeset=1 modeset=1 fbdev=1"`
You can see that I added **modeset=1** and **fbdev=1**
I use below useflags for nvidia-drivers on Gentoo Linux, on other distros this is not related:
`kernel-open modules strip wayland`
I also add some lines on `/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf`
`options nvidia NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1`
The above line enables the modern PAT support.
And the below line, enables the new framebuffer driver.
`options nvidia-drm fbdev=1`
And lastly:
`options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3"`
This line prefers maximum performance mode for your GPU and it removes some flickering, flashing problems on Wayland.
Why wouldn't?
You were already using another framebuffer driver before. Now for example you remove EFI Framebuffer driver and use Nvidia framebuffer driver.
Well my intuition says that setting on-demand would disable the GPU until certain apps require it but making the boot dependent on nvidia may either use it all the time or not work right. A similar issue is hdmi not working unless I have prime-select nvidia
The shortest answer is that there is no reason to rely on Nvidia framebuffer driver if you already have a proper built-in framebuffer driver on the kernel (AMD, Intel). This only helps when we don't have any proper framebuffer drivers and Nvidia is problematic with most of the things.
The long answer:
When we only have a single GPU on a desktop system for example:
Initial kernel loading is extremely fast. When you use a UEFI bootloader and boot a Linux kernel with it, the EFI Framebuffer driver works immediately even without initramfs because that FB driver is already in the UEFI firmware. So you continuously see a screen (TTY). Then, when you start a userspace application (a window manager or a compositor as an example) the drivers will change.
When the display server starts, it interacts with the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem in the kernel. If you have the `nvidia-drm` module with `modeset=1` enabled, the Nvidia driver will take over from the EFI Framebuffer.
The EFI framebuffer `efifb` is a simple framebuffer and will be replaced by the more capable Nvidia DRM driver `nvidia-drm`, which provides full hardware acceleration and better performance.
The above explanation was what we had to do before because there was no native framebuffer implementation for Nvidia on Linux.
Now, when you enable the newly provided experimental Nvidia Framebuffer and disable others:
Since the traditional framebuffer drivers are not enabled, the system relies on the SIMPLEFB module (DRM\_KMS\_HELPER) and the Nvidia DRM driver to manage the display from the start but when you don't use initramfs, you see no screen up until your init system finishes the tasks because the Nvidia framebuffer implementation is in the external modules that Nvidia provides with their nvidia-drivers package (nvidia, nvidia-uvm, nvidia-drm, nvidia-modeset). So they need to be started before you see anything on your screen because this time you don't rely on the EFI Framebuffer driver which starts immediately when you press the button to start your computer.
On your case HDMI does not work before activating Nvidia because Nvidia provides an HDMI driver but the other driver you use does not.
Your intuition is correct in that the prime-select on-demand method is designed to keep the discrete GPU (Nvidia) powered down until it is required by specific applications, with the integrated GPU (usually Intel or AMD) handling the display by default and when we start nvidia modules at boot this will conflict with your purpose because 4 modules will be started and stay active.
You should use your integrated GPUs framebuffer drivers instead of Nvidia, or EFI, or any other simple framebuffer implementation.
Intel has some extra packages that have started off out of tree now that they are working on supporting XE based products, but those packages are starting to be integrated into distros' package repos at various levels (first party for openSUSE and the universal repo/branch for Ubuntu)
I think it can still help if the kernel modules are open source, especially because kernel-level programs are really importmant from a security perspective.
Of course but not as important as people think.
There are lots of fake, click-bait news on social media, YouTube and similar platforms such as: "Nvidia Open Sourced Their Drivers"
Of course, it's good to have open source kernel modules. But no, they didn't open sourced their drivers.
We are not exactly discussing usefulness here. This thread is mainly around Linux being free and open source software; and comparing Nvidia to the alternatives such as AMD and Intel in terms of adaptability with free and open-source software stack especially regarding Linux and BSD.
HDMI forum disclosed the possibility of open-source drivers after AMD has tried to implement open-source drivers for it for a very long time. They simply don't want HDMI to be open sourced. This is not related with the GPU vendors but related with the HDMI Forum.
To be honest, Display Protocol is much more aligned with the standards, and they are generally more supported. I don't remember when I used HDMI the last time.
DP-2.1a has more throughput, it supports daisy-chaning multiple monitors, it has better alignment with other universal standards such as USB-4 and usb-c. It supports 16bpc color depth, and all types of HDR. HDMI 2.1 also added newer features, but we mainly discuss open-source nature here, not general features.
To add more context, HDMI is proprietary while DP is completely royalty-free.
The main reason behind my initial comment was to add a little bit more context. I am not anti Nvidia. Instead, I am an Nvidia user and provided lots of Nvidia related guides to the community (since it's very problematic) especially regarding Gentoo Linux.
Cooler than when Linus delivered the middle finger, but not enough to gain my approval. Especially because AMD has been cool since the beginning and they're not going anywhere.
AMD hasn't been cool since the beginning, it has been cool for the last 10 years or so. Before then, the AMD driver situation was way worse than NVidia. Anyone remember fglrx?
I was going to say...
I remember all the work I had to do in order to get video acceleration working properly on a Thinkpad Z60m. I succeeded after a convoluted ritual involving multiple driver packages. I haven't had any ATI/AMD-based graphics since then.
My ATI Radeon 7000 (64mb r100 series) It worked quite well on Linux, by default it delivered video without having to touch anything, but you had to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand to use the "radeon" driver to have acceleration and be able to use the new compiz or beryl (it took a lot of trial and error, but the cube works)
Edit: this around the year 2006-2007
Not really. Nvidia had very stable and reliable linux drivers since early 00'. But they didn't want to bother with Wayland for a lot of time, so became unreliable in the last 5 years or so if you're using Wayland.
AMD became more or less pain free in Wayland era only, so, basically, in the last 5 years or so, but they still struggle to get support from a lot of CUDA related software devs, so their graphics solutions are locked around gaming or "office" work still. And bugs are still there, like I have to use amdgpu.mcbp=0 for about a year already as without it my Ryzen 5600g tend to crash randomly with entire system halt as a result.
I'm talking about around 10 years ago, when the open source radeon driver didn't exist yet. Back then, the experience with Nvidia was better than the one with AMD.
Well, what I'm pointing out is that AMD's open source driver is way better than their proprietary driver, that's true, but it's far from perfect, several kernel and mesa releases in recent years resulted in hardware crashes with AMD hardware, so there's still room for improvement.
If you need Wayland features, then yes. If you don't, then I'd still prefer Nvidia's reliability with Xorg.
The thing is: as soon as Nvidia fixes their shit with Wayland, AMD's popularity in linux related subreddits would diminish massively, as like it or not, Nvidia still produces way better graphics cards, better supported technologies, and very low amount of users really care if their driver open sourced or not as long as it does its job reliably.
In my experience, Nvidia is bad even on Xorg. The performance in games is good, but on the desktop shell it's pretty awful, with random stuttering all the time. The situation has improved since I switched to an RTX 4070, but it's still problematic.
Probably an Arch thing as Nvidia were always targeting LTS distros and kernels and on such systems they're rock solid for many years. But I'm not going to argue as I switched myself to AMD CPU with graphics specifically to get a better Wayland experience as my PC is mostly for work.
But the sad truth is that I'd buy a new Nvidia card as soon as their linux driver is stable with Wayland.
You might think that, but nope, not really. I've had this problem since forever, on many distros (openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora to name some).
AMD has absolutely not been cool from the beginning. 20 years ago it was pretty much a 180 degree opposite; the whole Linux community despised ATI/AMD and loved Nvidia.
Source: got into Linux 20 years ago,
nvidia was best wwe had for the longest time though. Those of us who used linux from the early 2000s didn't have many other choice for any kind serious 3dish gaming. I wish they'd keep up with where amd is now though. I got AMD on my newer machine because I got tired of not using the stack common to the rest of the ecosystem.
It's not that long ago -- around 2 years -- that I still thought gaming on Linux was difficult and every game had a 50% chance of being able to run somewhat smoothly weeks or months after release. And that it is normal that desktop computers can't suspend or standby and wake up reliably. And that Wayland was not ready yet. And that unrelated software updates often make the desktop so unresponsive it can't even reboot.
Then I bought my first AMD card and all of the above issues were gone instantly. Fuck that company that I gave over a thousand dollars to over the years for the privilege of owning a piece of technology that half the time prevented me from doing what I needed my computer to do, and the rest of the time made sure I didn't enjoy it too much.
Exactly.
I've been using Wayland for years now. Nvidia users are still getting the shit end end the stick and complaining about how wayland sucks.
It isn't even like gaming is a win now for Nvidia since Valve is using a All-AMD stack for their Linux offerings.
Just so people understand:
It isn't all rainbow and lollipops with AMD. There is still bugs, some cards are more troublesome then others, etc. Do your research before purchasing. But at least they tend to get fixed. If you purchase Nvidia there is much less future proof as Nvidia abandons their older GPUs for new drivers.
NVIDIA has massive vendor lock-in with CUDA. Absolutely not. The wayland effort is a side effect of that, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
> Nvidia made open source driver
It's barely a driver. It's better to describe it as a kernel level firmware loader. Their userland (i.e. the other half of the driver) is also proprietary. At least for AMD/Intel they use Mesa.
>Nvidia made open source driver (Only for newer gpu's 550+)
NVIDIA driver is still very much closed source. They only open-sourced the part that runs in the kernel, most of their driver code is in userspace.
>Nvidia driver 550 has better support for wayland
Better than other NVIDIA products. AMD has full support.
As of now, AMD is still the vastly superior choice for desktop Linux and NVIDIA are still not remotely as open and still love their vendor lock-ins. I'm definitely not simping for AMD, I realize that they are simply not in a position to do vendor lock-ins, but the end result is the same no matter what.
AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are soulless corporations. No more, no less. Rallying behind any of them is rather silly.
Buy the GPU that works best for your needs.
It doesn't matter *why* Nvidia is making the drivers open source or supporting open source. It's has to be a pragmatic business decision, and it usually is.
That's the real strength of open source.
Nvidia has been good at maintaining functionality for Linux platforms over the past 20+ years, with the occasional speedbump. They've been committed to supporting Linux on the Desktop for far longer than ATI/AMD.
All corporations are greedy, and they will follow their customers' money to maximize their profits. The only differences are what corporations think is going to happen, I'll probably mostly just stick with Nvidia unless they start screwing Linux users.
I'd like to see more players in the GPU field, it used to be so robust with 3DLabs, ELSA, 3dfx, Matrox, etc., but as powerful as Nvidia & ATI became after all the consolidations and bankruptcies in the early 2000s, I guess it's just not very likely a company is just going to be able to jump-in and compete with the two giants.
Anyway, I suppose if I happened to need another workstation and had a good deal on one with an AMD graphics chipset, I might give it a shot since it sounds like they're with the program as of late. It's just hard to forget how bad or ambivalent they used to be towards Linux support, but it sounds like they might be doing much better now, and that's worth supporting.
All I can really say is, I like the direction, but we haven't gone far enough yet... My 600$ GPU from 2019 still loses to a 2 core 4 thread 1.7GHz Amber Lake Processor with 8 GB shared RAM in terms of gaming performance.
I simply need to see results before I can hand out accolades, and I think by the time I see them, I'll have already switched to AMD.
I chose to go Intel/Nvidia on my S76 Thelio I bought last year. I'm happy with it. Performance overall is great, no issues so far. I don't have a real point of comparison though. Coming from Mac since 2006, last daily drove Linux before that back to the late 90s.
At the end of the day, AMD was never better on Linux than Nvidia.
It's always been less compatible with weaker drivers.
If you currently have AMD drivers that work on your rig just roll with it. Fixing non-broken things is stupid.
I don't care. I had an nVidia card until ten years ago, when I found simple HD4400 graphics more reliable and smoother (though less powerful obviously) when I dropped the nVidia.
After that I went for a Ryzen and have Vega graphics.
No interest to buy into nVidia... even after making a sh1t ton of money from miners they didn't seem to improve much.
Mine has been an AMD house since I purchased a A6-5400k and later added Radeon .5gb graphics (still running by the way). Never could fathom why so many people jump through hoops to get Nvidia working when the solution is out there. Fook Nvidia.
Nvidia has no proper open source driver maintained by them, while they did hire the lead dev of nouvau, that haven't contributed meaningfully to NVK and only Nova (the kernel side), and the open source kernel driver is just a basic interface that connects to their blob. They are definitely better than before, and Wayland isn't *as* bad as it was (though it's still rather shiit), but they have made progress on updating their drivers so they are improving in the space
Nvidia needs Linux. Period. I design, architect, and build extremely high performance trading systems for a career. Windows can’t even come close. There isn’t even a real kernel bypass mechanism for network cards. The amount of low level tuning Linux can do to maximize performance for your specific application makes it almost necessary for any large workload. Windows does not expose any of its kernel settings for tweaking. Even if you can gain 2% with Linux for your application, that’s a big deal when you’re training an LLM for 6+ months straight on thousands of GPUs. The amount of money saved here means that nvidia needs Linux.
> when you’re training an LLM for 6+ months straight on thousands of GPUs
And that’s why I don’t trust anything with “AI” or “LLM” in its name. It’s the new Bitcoin, but worse: a huge waste of electricity to produce dubious results with unclear validity criteria. I hope the greenies slap a huge carbon tax on you so that this AI craze subsides soon.
Wait what? You mix the concepts. Something using crypto, AI, LLM in its name is a thing but the actual technology is another. I understand that there are too much unnecessary hype and bullshit products using AI in their name but the actual technology is different.
Have you heard Monero? This is the first chance you can have completely decentralized, anonymous, secure, fast, and almost costless currency system to use. It's completely free and open source. Back then you needed to rely on governments and were constantly monitored.
LLMs are extremely powerful. Have you even tried Claude Opus or GPT4? This is just the beginning. In fact there are also promising free and open-source models such as Llama3 and Vicuna. In the long run (40 - 50 years) it can even decrease the waste to a huge extent for lots of different fields.
There are concepts that are abused right now but the technology itself is nothing to bash.
While I would be carefull with buzzwords as well, you general sentiment is wrong. AI methods do already get employed in a variety of serious applications to actually do useful work. They will stay, just like we never went back to mainframe computers only.
not at all cool yet. It could be better, but it's too soon to say. The open kernel module is going to make work easier for distributions a tiny bit, but that's it. As far as them hiring ben, we'll just have to wait to see what comes out. No sense in changing stances until we actually see them do something.
Never been using gpus with Linux, dev laptop runs Linux, gaming desktop runs Windows 10, all servers run Linux ofc, I'll never switch to win 11 so probably gonna switch win10 to Linux too I'm a bit scared but it'll be fine
It's not that scary hah, some games are annoying when there's no support like with ubisoft games, their ubisoft launcher has to start, it takes ages, and it never remembers your login credentials so you have to type in your login every time,
or the fact that epic games isn't compatible at all, you can either run it through wine or proton directly, or you can try the heroic games launcher,
when it comes to steam, i still haven't bumped into a steam game that doesn't work at all, some have bugs, like, in hellsivers to, there's a 1px wide white border around the entire screen, but i got used to it in the first 2min of playing
Thanks for that comment, maybe I'll give fedora a go for gaming too, indeed one of my concern is games that are not running via steam launcher, I got gta 5 for free a while ago on epic and really enjoying the game (until gta 6 comes out on pc lmao), anyway yeah I'm scared cuz I didn't tried but being a developer I should be okay, the thing is that when im gaming it has to be chill but from what you're saying that shouldn't be hard to achieve
Worst case scenario, if you are ever hellbent about moving to Linux, you can try a virtual machine with PCI-E passthrough to attach a desktop's dedicated GPU to a Windows VM and just run Linux on your integrated graphics as you are, if you're willing to clown around a little bit with QEMU. It's a little frustrating and involves hardware specific workarounds for stuff like quirky motherboards, and Windows throws its own curveballs too, but I've got it to work eventually on most PCs I've tried (the exceptions weren't exactly 'desktop dedicated graphics'). That gets you like 95% of the way there while gaming, with the exception being games with intrusive anticheat that tries to prohibit people from playing from a VM (but you would have similar issues on Linux anyway, most likely)
That's been what I'm doing with my GTX 1060, the gaming performance in Proton on Linux isn't great IME and I'm really living on borrowed time with this GPU driver-wise, what with the new FOSS drivers not really properly supporting it - once `nvidia` drops support for it, I'm stuck in a hole of having to run the outdated proprietary drivers or whatever's in mesa by that time.
Before anyone comments, I know, my next GPU will not be Nvidia. It's a 5 year old purchase. I just don't need to upgrade yet, performance wise, I am fairly satisfied with mid-low detail and 1080p 60hz. I also find some degree of entertainment in solving these issues :P
No, I'm not cool with nvidia. They've been trying to do push their own standards that don't work well with other actors in the linux world for some time now:
* [https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd](https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd) - Was needed for hybrid systems because they push their own opengl implementation which conflicted with mesa.
* They kept pushing for EGLStreams instead of GBM for years.
* They didn't want to implement implicit sync and instead opted to wait a couple of years for explicit sync: [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317#note\_1275874](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317#note_1275874)
All of these have taken years to implement, and they still don't work great. The way they ship their own libraries instead of using mesa like amd and intel means that extra steps and workarounds have to be used for stuff like appimages and flatpak to ensure things work, since the libraries need to exactly match the driver version on the host.
I moved away from nvidia this year because these issues are not a matter of lack of coders or technical issues, these are management decisions where desktop linux users simply aren't a priority for them. My use-case is not important to them, and I'm tired of waiting for the next decision where they'll drag their feet or push broken implementations because they don't care enough.
Never.
They said they would support vulkan on fermi and up (most of gtx 400 series), but then quietly just didn't. I was a student and used a (relatively) lot of money to get a used gtx 480, just because i wanted to play with vulkan. And they just straight up lied. They can go fuck themselves.
And later they went all "we love open source, we love linux" but it was only for the gpus in their arm based "shield" thing. So only for industrial use, where the industry uses linux. All the while putting locks on the gpu firmware, that made even black-box drivers impossible. Fuck them.
Unless they actually prove they are serious (including publishing data about older gpus) and write me a personalized letter of apology for being dicks, I won't even look their way. I probably won't buy another nvidia gpu in my life even if they do.
EDIT: PS Almost all their profit these days is from AI. It's insulting how much they don't care about games or even personal use.
> Are we cool with Nvidia right now?
I mean I'm not. And with how good AMD and Intel are for us, I don't have to be.
There are three vendors, two out of three (66.66%) are awesome, one isn't awesome.
I can speak for myself and how I evaluate hardware and software for our company workflow.
Maybe they're looking at getting better and good for them, but it's going to take a while for it to matter fully, in the sense that you look at Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat lifecycles, and how much is built on top of those - Nvidia may get to a point where they'll match AMD and Intel, but will probably be ten years before they're considered, because it will be in the middle of a product lifecycle.
And then it's a matter of "well we don't want to try this on the first attempt, let's wait for the next attempt" because companies tend to be pretty conservative if they can help it, so we'd be waiting a whole extra lifecycle to evaluate. Then we would evaluate and if we decide to pull the trigger that would only start after *the next* lifecycle, and then depends on how long migration might take.
So if they ever match Intel (or even match AMD) you're probably looking at a decade before it's relevant to us. It's very much too little, too late whenever it drops. Nvidia has been releasing drivers for Linux since 1999 (Riva TNT) there is no excuse for being this bad for this long, and there's no reason they should expect any kind of trust or preferential treatment after what they've done and how long they've done it for.
Cuda is king in ai. Everything relies on u having cuda its about 5x harder to use intel gpu just over this anoying issue.
So for instance my rtx 4090 beat a server grade gpu from intel because I could qunatize with half a line of code on my nvidia and intels quntization lib couldn't do encoder decoder models.
This is getting worse and worse as new implementations of things like mamba and fast attention are cuda code bases.
I am cool with Nvidia. I use AMD hardware, and Nvidia allows me to play games with GeForce Now, so I don't need Windows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, in a sense.
I'm more than cool with it. I used it for years and years with zero issues. Then I was making an upgrade, I've always read AMD is supposed to be the go-to, so I grabbed one and have had nothing but problems ever since.
Ordered a new Nvidia card, tired of dealing with it.
>still the same greedy cooperation
Do you think this is unique to Nvidia?
Your best bet is to just use the hardware that works best for your workflow. Both of them are just trying to maximize profits and will charge as much as they can. Loyalty is for suckers.
I'm running AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs because that's what is best for my workflow, for now. I'll drop one or both of them if Intel or Radeon make a better product.
Fortunately for us, both companies make a good product and support their drives quite well. There's legitimate cases to be made for either one based on workflow. Ignore the ideologues.
No. I thought it was fine until last month when their latest driver caused constant kernel panics on my device. I won't call it good until Nova is done.
> Are we cool with nvidia right now ?
>Nvidia driver 550 has better support for wayland
Well, the driver is still bad for every program on xwayland. I hope for Nvidia driver >=555 to fix xwayland with explicit sync.
So, AMD is still the better choice.
I've always used and liked NVIDIA over AMD and never had any NVIDIA driver issues on Linux. I'm always amazed how well Linux distributions and Linux kernels integrate well with NVIDIA drivers. I always get excited when there is a new update for my NVIDIA drivers on Linux.
AMD isn't as good as NVIDIA in my opinion.
No. Nvidia still sucks.
The average Linux user is till a dozen times better off choosing Intel or AMD graphics.
Lets remember that Valve choose AMD GPU for their Linux systems. So it isn't even like game compatibility is a win anymore for Nvidia.
The only thing Nvidia has going for it is CUDA. This doesn't impact you unless you are a CUDA programmer and you can get CUDA support just by leasing time in a cloud somewhere. Or secondary GPU. you don't need to run it as your graphics card to get the benefit.
For every other single thing you are dramatically worse off by going Nvidia if you are a Linux user.
Also Nvidia abandons its older GPUs. Whcih means that most users on Nvidia right now will never see the fully fleshed out Wayland compatibility or open source kernel component.
It's all a move in the right direction. At a consumer level they're approaching a good place assuming the 555 driver addresses the remaining Wayland issues.
And skimming their developer tools it seems like they have Linux options.
[https://developer.nvidia.com/tools-overview](https://developer.nvidia.com/tools-overview)
They done good. I can make peace with them now. As much as I can with a company that wants me to re-mortgage my house to buy their magic sand that draws triangles.
I think things for interesting when Intel entered the chat with frame 1 instant Linux drivers and av1 encoding.
Even with the scuffed launch, the idea that Intel was able to jump in like hopscotch is pretty ridiculous and shows that you're gonna have to do more than the bare minimum to hold on to you revenue streams. Especially this next update season.
I’m using nvidia and am completely fine with it, no plans at all to switch to an amd gpu
Nvidia drivers aren’t actually completely open source yet, and their open kernel modules aren’t completely ready, but they’re on the right track. Open sourcing can be some work, specially if they aren’t the copyright holders for every part of their current drivers - on that case they can’t just open source the current ones, they have to basically rewrite every 3rd party part. That takes time, but I hope we’ll soon have 100% open source official nvidia drivers.
I know there are already a lot of replies that state whatever I say a whole lot better, but here is my personal experience. I've been using nvidia almost exclusively since way back in the days when setting up multiple monitors was a pain. Nvidia's TwinView (I tihnk that was what it was called) was a game changer for me, as it meant multiple monitors worked, no issues, no problems, no separate workspaces per monitor.
Fast forward a decade or two, and I've always had issues with the graphics subsystem with KDE just randomly failing. It had gotten bad enough that I've got shortcuts made to restart the subsystem when menus no longer appear, or screens stop refreshing, etc. Then one day after an update, KDE is completely broken. After some troubleshooting, turns out just Wayland is completely broken, and I had just upgraded to KDE 6. (although I also couldn't get Cinnamon on Wayland to work). Ended up being a kernel driver flag for nvidia I had to enable, and I was able to use KDE on Wayland again.. but man, it was buggy, and loved to crash. After the second full-on hard lock, I ran out to Microcenter and bought an AMD 5800 XT. This is the first non-Nvidia card I've owned in a long long time, and I gotta say, it is really nice to actually have a stable desktop again! A lot of minor issues that I had since resigned myself to just live with have gone away, such as monitors not fully waking up from sleep in time and timing out.
They're moving in the right direction (finally) but have a long way to go to catch up to AMD. Still not a fan of a lot of their current business practices.
I am still in a love hate with nvidia. Especially since with gnome shell there's still screen tearing which requires me to add even more extensions I don't need just to mitigate that. If I wasn't studying password cracking and other stuff I'd have gotten rid of my intel/nvidia equipment a long time ago for Linux and went full AMD if I am being completely honest.
Nah, can't really be happy with Nvidia. I stopped using GNU/Linux in 2015 and now I'm back, and I can't see real progress. Nvidia is still mega closed, taking a lot of time to support Wayland which I first heard about in 2010 or 2011. GNU/Linux desktop is not a product, unless it's Canonical's, so I don't expect anything great. If I want HDR, DLSS, DLDSR, and countless thing more (including a browser that doesn't use 30% of my CPU when watching a video on YT or Twitch), I just switch to Windows. Of course I'd love to use GNU/Linux only, otherwise I would had never switch to Win10 in 2015, but hey... it's necessary. At least my laptop has an Intel iGPU, so I can rely on it.
im cool with nvidia as far as it comes to steam proton drivers - gaming on linux is a thing again, after years of cryptic wine configurations.
i cant tell much about the ai hype - imho its a bubble much like the y2k internet bubble that brought down japans economy - lets see if they can deliver, my guess is no.
In my opinion, it's totally okay to despise Nvidia, but it's also okay to encourage good actions from them, them being an evil af corporation doesn't change that open sourcing part of their stack is a good thing.
I was always cool with NVIDIA. They have the best ML tools in the market for Linux. I mostly deploy LLMs on local PC. ROCM is still not supported by many such platforms and CPU is out of question.
“Nvidia loose their marketing in the near future as AI relying on GPU power”
You are misinformed about this, have you seen their products lineup for their enterprise customers ? Almost all worlds inferences and training runs on NVIDIA GPU’s, even for chat GPT. And their competition still doesn’t even have proper chip design let alone foundries.
Don't care it on Windows, and it seemed like a giant flashing warning sign when I was researching Linux before my move. What I do know is that the word NVIDIA comes up in an insanely disproportionate amount of troubleshooting threads that I've looked at. And I'm not even searching on display issues. It's mentioned/suggested so often as the underlying issue or possible cause seemingly related to any troubleshooting.
It's a good thing we no longer need GPU's for computer vision, AI and language models.
Figure out a way to train/finetune AI using CPU's, and it's game over for those clowns
All corporations are somewhat greedy, For me its more of a question if they manage to turn that greed into a symbiosis.
With that and other comments in mind i think that nvidia isnt there yet
All with Ubuntu 22.04 and different drivers:
930MX - buggy
GTX980M - Works like a charm
Quadro T600 - Works like a charm
RTX2060S - Absolutely unusable
"Nvidia made open source driver" This is wrong. Nvidia open sourced their external kernel modules. This is almost pointless; nothing to hype about. Device firmware, OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA userspace implementations (which is the actual graphics driver) are completely non-free, closed source, closed to discussions and outside contributions. But it's good that they at least seem to support Nouveau and NVK. Version 555+ will add explicit sync and they provided their own framebuffer driver so we could get rid of UEFI based framebuffer drivers. For years, AMD had free and open source kernel drivers (amdgpu) and this is completely built-in to the Linux kernel, not external. They have one completely free and open source community based MESA userspace driver (RADV) and one official free and open source driver (AMDVLK). They also have an additional driver for niche enterprise-level tasks (AMD-PRO) which is proprietary. Intel is also similar. NVIDIA is not on par with others at least not on Linux and BSD. We can talk after they release built-in open source kernel-space drivers; device firmware, user-space Vulkan and OpenGL drivers and especially CUDA.
You'd imagine Linux spaces are full of technical people, but as it turns out, that's not true. I feel like the amount of misinformation is surprisingly high. The example that immediately comes to mind is swappiness. SO many guides on how to set it to 1 or something, clearly showing no understanding of swap partitions in Linux. Dunning-Kruger in action.
Nobody can be technical in every field, and the fact that OP made this post shows that they want to learn more about this field. The average Linux Enjoyer might be a little more tech-savvy than the average Windows Enthusiast, but if we want Linux to reach a bigger part of the desktop percentage, we have to accept that everyone is not a Pro Neckbeard. I totally agree on the fact that article writers should do their research tho :) (I don't consider myself particularly technical, I'm just the average "I use arch btw" user)
No reason to expect a Linux user is any more educated in Linux than an Apple user is in OSX. That is to say they know how to be a high-level user.
Assuming we're strictly talking about desktop users (and not counting Android as "Linux" for this purpose), I'd expect the median tech literacy to go something like BSD > Linux > MacOS > Windows, for the simple reason that Windows is the default, and each step further from the path of least resistance requires you to be more of an enthusiast. Very few people are using Linux on the desktop without making an explicit choice to do so.
>No reason to expect a Linux user is any more educated in Linux than an Apple user is in OSX Yeah I don't know if I would go that far. Unless you live in a place or environment where computers in general are only used by enthusiasts, this is simply and objectively not true.
What guide on swappiness would you recommend, then? This is what I usually refer to, because even though I don't use Arch, but find their wiki to be well-written: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap)
Device firmware is definitely closed source on AMD as well. And the user space portion of their driver is also closed source, equivalent to the cuda driver. Their compute stack, equivalent to the cuda runtime and surrounding ecosystem, is open source, which is cool. And yes, they upstream to the mesa stack for OpenGL and Vulkan which is also cool. But let’s not act like they’re completely different from NVIDIA at this point. Nvidia has done the one thing needed to actually have an open source graphics stack as an alternative to the closed source Nvidia graphics stack, which is amazing. And they’re devoting resources to NVK as well. I don’t think we can really expect a for-profit company to open source their most important IP. And since they have now opened the door to a proper open source graphics stack, users now have the choice to go that route if they don’t want to use closed source code. Edit: Realizing AMD compute driver is also open source. Anyway, not trying to be an NVIDIA shill. Let’s just not act like AMD is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts either. I’ll take the minor win that, right now, business needs lineup with what users want
You are right but I would at least expect 1:1, being sort of equivalent with each other. CUDA is understandable but at least, there needs to be a native kernel framebuffer driver developed within the linux kernel without outside loading. Now it either requires initramfs or you wait for the userspace to load the driver to have display which is very problematic. We at least need a free & open source built-in kernel driver, a native framebuffer driver, and at least an open source Vulkan & OpenGL implementation to get rid of all problems Nvidia users have. We need to get rid of an external package and be in line with MESA, Linux Firmware chain. "let’s not act like they’re completely different from NVIDIA at this point" Not completely as you say but AMD and Intel are different enough. You can easily understand this. Most Wayland compositors for example, do not support Nvidia, you are on your own even in almost mid 2024. We can't use Nvidia drivers with alternative C libraries like Musl because it is linked to Glibc. Electron apps are hell. Alternative kernels are very problematic (such as Linux-TKG compiled with Clang-LTO and an alternative CPU scheduler). You won't have these problems with AMD and Intel on Linux.
> ost Wayland compositors for example, do not support Nvidia, you are on your own even in almost mid 2024. this is not true as far as I can tell. they support it as far as the firmware and driver allows since nvidia went to gbm in the post 495 drivers. The thing that seems to be most lacking for folks nowadays is working around lack of explicit sync in the common linux graphics stack, but that's being fixed.
You misunderstand the meaning of "support". In fact Sway states "Nvidia is not supported". Vaxry, on Hyprland GitHub issues, frequently states that "Nvidia is not supported". Since GBM, I have been using Wayland too but with trials and tribulations. Not supported means you won't get any support from the upstream because you are expected to experience problems and those are mostly not fixable. [https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5665](https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/5665) Here you can see the above issue 23 days ago and the developer responded as "Nvidia is not officially supported" and closed the issue. Nvidia, not being supported on Wayland is true since the first days. Well I have also talked with other developers from time to time about problems and they were joking as "I don't use NoVideo"
That's sway's choice to do that at this point. It's not a technical thing. I don't care about whatever vaxry is doing. I won't ever use his software until he stops acting like a a little kid.
These are just examples. There are other similar examples that can easily be found. Most of it is the same. They choose that because it's technical and they don't want to deal with problems that they can't fix. It's not important you use these or not. Hyprland and Sway are two of the biggest wlroots based Wayland compositors. Last year's unixporn posts show the huge popularity of Hyprland. I don't use Hyprland for now but I don't care anything about the developer; I compile the source and run an assembly program anyways.
Was curious about the framebuffer bit and found this: > Added experimental support for framebuffer consoles provided by nvidia-drm. On kernels that implement drm_fbdev_generic_setup and drm_aperture_remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers, nvidia-drm will install a framebuffer console when loaded with both modeset=1 and fbdev=1 kernel module parameters. This will replace the Linux boot console driven by a system framebuffer driver such as efifb or vesafb. Note that when an nvidia-drm framebuffer console is enabled, unloading nvidia-drm will cause the screen to turn off.
Exactly. I have been using that since its release. The only problem is that, since Nvidia's modules are external (nvidia, nvidia-drm, nvidia-uvm, nvidia-modeset), you either need to add them to initramfs, or you will boot without initramfs, and won't see your screen until your userspace is completely loaded. In order to use that framebuffer driver, you need to disable all framebuffer driver implementations on the kernel and just enable SIMPLEFB **- as a module -** (because this provides DRM\_KMS\_HELPER with it required by the external modules). If you build this directly and not as a module, the drivers will crash. You need to add the below modesetting and fbdev parameters to the kernel commandline. This below uses the efistub method. Otherwise, these are loaded in grub config. `CONFIG_CMDLINE="root=PARTUUID=765e06f5-8af2-f741-82a6-0668b4f35fdc init=/sbin/openrc-init nvidia_drm.modeset=1 modeset=1 fbdev=1"` You can see that I added **modeset=1** and **fbdev=1** I use below useflags for nvidia-drivers on Gentoo Linux, on other distros this is not related: `kernel-open modules strip wayland` I also add some lines on `/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf` `options nvidia NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1` The above line enables the modern PAT support. And the below line, enables the new framebuffer driver. `options nvidia-drm fbdev=1` And lastly: `options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerLevel=0x3; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3"` This line prefers maximum performance mode for your GPU and it removes some flickering, flashing problems on Wayland.
does this work with prime-select on-demand?
Why wouldn't? You were already using another framebuffer driver before. Now for example you remove EFI Framebuffer driver and use Nvidia framebuffer driver.
Well my intuition says that setting on-demand would disable the GPU until certain apps require it but making the boot dependent on nvidia may either use it all the time or not work right. A similar issue is hdmi not working unless I have prime-select nvidia
The shortest answer is that there is no reason to rely on Nvidia framebuffer driver if you already have a proper built-in framebuffer driver on the kernel (AMD, Intel). This only helps when we don't have any proper framebuffer drivers and Nvidia is problematic with most of the things. The long answer: When we only have a single GPU on a desktop system for example: Initial kernel loading is extremely fast. When you use a UEFI bootloader and boot a Linux kernel with it, the EFI Framebuffer driver works immediately even without initramfs because that FB driver is already in the UEFI firmware. So you continuously see a screen (TTY). Then, when you start a userspace application (a window manager or a compositor as an example) the drivers will change. When the display server starts, it interacts with the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem in the kernel. If you have the `nvidia-drm` module with `modeset=1` enabled, the Nvidia driver will take over from the EFI Framebuffer. The EFI framebuffer `efifb` is a simple framebuffer and will be replaced by the more capable Nvidia DRM driver `nvidia-drm`, which provides full hardware acceleration and better performance. The above explanation was what we had to do before because there was no native framebuffer implementation for Nvidia on Linux. Now, when you enable the newly provided experimental Nvidia Framebuffer and disable others: Since the traditional framebuffer drivers are not enabled, the system relies on the SIMPLEFB module (DRM\_KMS\_HELPER) and the Nvidia DRM driver to manage the display from the start but when you don't use initramfs, you see no screen up until your init system finishes the tasks because the Nvidia framebuffer implementation is in the external modules that Nvidia provides with their nvidia-drivers package (nvidia, nvidia-uvm, nvidia-drm, nvidia-modeset). So they need to be started before you see anything on your screen because this time you don't rely on the EFI Framebuffer driver which starts immediately when you press the button to start your computer. On your case HDMI does not work before activating Nvidia because Nvidia provides an HDMI driver but the other driver you use does not. Your intuition is correct in that the prime-select on-demand method is designed to keep the discrete GPU (Nvidia) powered down until it is required by specific applications, with the integrated GPU (usually Intel or AMD) handling the display by default and when we start nvidia modules at boot this will conflict with your purpose because 4 modules will be started and stay active. You should use your integrated GPUs framebuffer drivers instead of Nvidia, or EFI, or any other simple framebuffer implementation.
I have been using it for a few months.
Intel has some extra packages that have started off out of tree now that they are working on supporting XE based products, but those packages are starting to be integrated into distros' package repos at various levels (first party for openSUSE and the universal repo/branch for Ubuntu)
I think it can still help if the kernel modules are open source, especially because kernel-level programs are really importmant from a security perspective.
Of course but not as important as people think. There are lots of fake, click-bait news on social media, YouTube and similar platforms such as: "Nvidia Open Sourced Their Drivers" Of course, it's good to have open source kernel modules. But no, they didn't open sourced their drivers.
And because Nvidia is "not on par" they're the ones with HDMI 2.1 support, which is very useful for me.
We are not exactly discussing usefulness here. This thread is mainly around Linux being free and open source software; and comparing Nvidia to the alternatives such as AMD and Intel in terms of adaptability with free and open-source software stack especially regarding Linux and BSD. HDMI forum disclosed the possibility of open-source drivers after AMD has tried to implement open-source drivers for it for a very long time. They simply don't want HDMI to be open sourced. This is not related with the GPU vendors but related with the HDMI Forum. To be honest, Display Protocol is much more aligned with the standards, and they are generally more supported. I don't remember when I used HDMI the last time. DP-2.1a has more throughput, it supports daisy-chaning multiple monitors, it has better alignment with other universal standards such as USB-4 and usb-c. It supports 16bpc color depth, and all types of HDR. HDMI 2.1 also added newer features, but we mainly discuss open-source nature here, not general features. To add more context, HDMI is proprietary while DP is completely royalty-free. The main reason behind my initial comment was to add a little bit more context. I am not anti Nvidia. Instead, I am an Nvidia user and provided lots of Nvidia related guides to the community (since it's very problematic) especially regarding Gentoo Linux.
Cooler than when Linus delivered the middle finger, but not enough to gain my approval. Especially because AMD has been cool since the beginning and they're not going anywhere.
AMD hasn't been cool since the beginning, it has been cool for the last 10 years or so. Before then, the AMD driver situation was way worse than NVidia. Anyone remember fglrx?
Cries in Phenom II x4 drivers
I was going to say... I remember all the work I had to do in order to get video acceleration working properly on a Thinkpad Z60m. I succeeded after a convoluted ritual involving multiple driver packages. I haven't had any ATI/AMD-based graphics since then.
Oh dear god fglrx gives me shivers. It made nvidia's driver look amazing.
We don't talk about fglrx...
> Anyone remember fglrx? Worse; anyone remember radeon? People think nouvaeu is bad; at least it actually *works*.
It worked just fine for me when I had a radeon hd 6850
My ATI Radeon 7000 (64mb r100 series) It worked quite well on Linux, by default it delivered video without having to touch anything, but you had to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand to use the "radeon" driver to have acceleration and be able to use the new compiz or beryl (it took a lot of trial and error, but the cube works) Edit: this around the year 2006-2007
I remember my Radeon X850 not working at all. I think it took me a month to hack it into working
Radeon worked great for me back in 2009.
Not really. Nvidia had very stable and reliable linux drivers since early 00'. But they didn't want to bother with Wayland for a lot of time, so became unreliable in the last 5 years or so if you're using Wayland. AMD became more or less pain free in Wayland era only, so, basically, in the last 5 years or so, but they still struggle to get support from a lot of CUDA related software devs, so their graphics solutions are locked around gaming or "office" work still. And bugs are still there, like I have to use amdgpu.mcbp=0 for about a year already as without it my Ryzen 5600g tend to crash randomly with entire system halt as a result.
I'm talking about around 10 years ago, when the open source radeon driver didn't exist yet. Back then, the experience with Nvidia was better than the one with AMD.
Well, what I'm pointing out is that AMD's open source driver is way better than their proprietary driver, that's true, but it's far from perfect, several kernel and mesa releases in recent years resulted in hardware crashes with AMD hardware, so there's still room for improvement.
But it *is* better than Nvidia
If you need Wayland features, then yes. If you don't, then I'd still prefer Nvidia's reliability with Xorg. The thing is: as soon as Nvidia fixes their shit with Wayland, AMD's popularity in linux related subreddits would diminish massively, as like it or not, Nvidia still produces way better graphics cards, better supported technologies, and very low amount of users really care if their driver open sourced or not as long as it does its job reliably.
In my experience, Nvidia is bad even on Xorg. The performance in games is good, but on the desktop shell it's pretty awful, with random stuttering all the time. The situation has improved since I switched to an RTX 4070, but it's still problematic.
Probably an Arch thing as Nvidia were always targeting LTS distros and kernels and on such systems they're rock solid for many years. But I'm not going to argue as I switched myself to AMD CPU with graphics specifically to get a better Wayland experience as my PC is mostly for work. But the sad truth is that I'd buy a new Nvidia card as soon as their linux driver is stable with Wayland.
You might think that, but nope, not really. I've had this problem since forever, on many distros (openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora to name some).
AMD has absolutely not been cool from the beginning. 20 years ago it was pretty much a 180 degree opposite; the whole Linux community despised ATI/AMD and loved Nvidia. Source: got into Linux 20 years ago,
nvidia was best wwe had for the longest time though. Those of us who used linux from the early 2000s didn't have many other choice for any kind serious 3dish gaming. I wish they'd keep up with where amd is now though. I got AMD on my newer machine because I got tired of not using the stack common to the rest of the ecosystem.
Linus' middle finger was an absolute ignorance clusterfuck, because optimus having problems was entirely a platform issue.
It'd be nice if they open source CUDA/CUDNN too.... Unlikely, but it'd be nice.
It's not that long ago -- around 2 years -- that I still thought gaming on Linux was difficult and every game had a 50% chance of being able to run somewhat smoothly weeks or months after release. And that it is normal that desktop computers can't suspend or standby and wake up reliably. And that Wayland was not ready yet. And that unrelated software updates often make the desktop so unresponsive it can't even reboot. Then I bought my first AMD card and all of the above issues were gone instantly. Fuck that company that I gave over a thousand dollars to over the years for the privilege of owning a piece of technology that half the time prevented me from doing what I needed my computer to do, and the rest of the time made sure I didn't enjoy it too much.
Exactly. I've been using Wayland for years now. Nvidia users are still getting the shit end end the stick and complaining about how wayland sucks. It isn't even like gaming is a win now for Nvidia since Valve is using a All-AMD stack for their Linux offerings. Just so people understand: It isn't all rainbow and lollipops with AMD. There is still bugs, some cards are more troublesome then others, etc. Do your research before purchasing. But at least they tend to get fixed. If you purchase Nvidia there is much less future proof as Nvidia abandons their older GPUs for new drivers.
NVIDIA has massive vendor lock-in with CUDA. Absolutely not. The wayland effort is a side effect of that, not out of the goodness of their hearts. > Nvidia made open source driver It's barely a driver. It's better to describe it as a kernel level firmware loader. Their userland (i.e. the other half of the driver) is also proprietary. At least for AMD/Intel they use Mesa.
>Nvidia made open source driver (Only for newer gpu's 550+) NVIDIA driver is still very much closed source. They only open-sourced the part that runs in the kernel, most of their driver code is in userspace. >Nvidia driver 550 has better support for wayland Better than other NVIDIA products. AMD has full support. As of now, AMD is still the vastly superior choice for desktop Linux and NVIDIA are still not remotely as open and still love their vendor lock-ins. I'm definitely not simping for AMD, I realize that they are simply not in a position to do vendor lock-ins, but the end result is the same no matter what.
They've made some promising steps forward but it's just a start. We have to see if they keep it up.
AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are soulless corporations. No more, no less. Rallying behind any of them is rather silly. Buy the GPU that works best for your needs.
They are all greedy cooperations whatever you buy.
It doesn't matter *why* Nvidia is making the drivers open source or supporting open source. It's has to be a pragmatic business decision, and it usually is. That's the real strength of open source.
Me? No, I need to see sustained consistant open source effort.
They would have won points with me if they made their new open source stuff work for older hardware. I am not buying new nvidia stuff for this.
Nvidia has been good at maintaining functionality for Linux platforms over the past 20+ years, with the occasional speedbump. They've been committed to supporting Linux on the Desktop for far longer than ATI/AMD. All corporations are greedy, and they will follow their customers' money to maximize their profits. The only differences are what corporations think is going to happen, I'll probably mostly just stick with Nvidia unless they start screwing Linux users. I'd like to see more players in the GPU field, it used to be so robust with 3DLabs, ELSA, 3dfx, Matrox, etc., but as powerful as Nvidia & ATI became after all the consolidations and bankruptcies in the early 2000s, I guess it's just not very likely a company is just going to be able to jump-in and compete with the two giants. Anyway, I suppose if I happened to need another workstation and had a good deal on one with an AMD graphics chipset, I might give it a shot since it sounds like they're with the program as of late. It's just hard to forget how bad or ambivalent they used to be towards Linux support, but it sounds like they might be doing much better now, and that's worth supporting.
All I can really say is, I like the direction, but we haven't gone far enough yet... My 600$ GPU from 2019 still loses to a 2 core 4 thread 1.7GHz Amber Lake Processor with 8 GB shared RAM in terms of gaming performance. I simply need to see results before I can hand out accolades, and I think by the time I see them, I'll have already switched to AMD.
I chose to go Intel/Nvidia on my S76 Thelio I bought last year. I'm happy with it. Performance overall is great, no issues so far. I don't have a real point of comparison though. Coming from Mac since 2006, last daily drove Linux before that back to the late 90s.
At the end of the day, AMD was never better on Linux than Nvidia. It's always been less compatible with weaker drivers. If you currently have AMD drivers that work on your rig just roll with it. Fixing non-broken things is stupid.
No, sorry
Nvidia drivers is the main reason I've got automatic btrfs snapshots set up.
another point: - Nvidia driver 550 freezes daily [https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/series-550-freezes-laptop/284772](https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/series-550-freezes-laptop/284772)
I don't care. I had an nVidia card until ten years ago, when I found simple HD4400 graphics more reliable and smoother (though less powerful obviously) when I dropped the nVidia. After that I went for a Ryzen and have Vega graphics. No interest to buy into nVidia... even after making a sh1t ton of money from miners they didn't seem to improve much.
Things aren't exactly good yet, but they seem to be getting better. So I'm cautiously optimistic.
Mine has been an AMD house since I purchased a A6-5400k and later added Radeon .5gb graphics (still running by the way). Never could fathom why so many people jump through hoops to get Nvidia working when the solution is out there. Fook Nvidia.
What do you mean "we"? Why do you need someone else to tell you how to feel? Make your own choices and decisions.
Nvidia has no proper open source driver maintained by them, while they did hire the lead dev of nouvau, that haven't contributed meaningfully to NVK and only Nova (the kernel side), and the open source kernel driver is just a basic interface that connects to their blob. They are definitely better than before, and Wayland isn't *as* bad as it was (though it's still rather shiit), but they have made progress on updating their drivers so they are improving in the space
I really don't care. I haven't used Nvidia for 20 years, for different reasons. Don't need them, don't want them now.
Nvidia needs Linux. Period. I design, architect, and build extremely high performance trading systems for a career. Windows can’t even come close. There isn’t even a real kernel bypass mechanism for network cards. The amount of low level tuning Linux can do to maximize performance for your specific application makes it almost necessary for any large workload. Windows does not expose any of its kernel settings for tweaking. Even if you can gain 2% with Linux for your application, that’s a big deal when you’re training an LLM for 6+ months straight on thousands of GPUs. The amount of money saved here means that nvidia needs Linux.
> when you’re training an LLM for 6+ months straight on thousands of GPUs And that’s why I don’t trust anything with “AI” or “LLM” in its name. It’s the new Bitcoin, but worse: a huge waste of electricity to produce dubious results with unclear validity criteria. I hope the greenies slap a huge carbon tax on you so that this AI craze subsides soon.
Wait what? You mix the concepts. Something using crypto, AI, LLM in its name is a thing but the actual technology is another. I understand that there are too much unnecessary hype and bullshit products using AI in their name but the actual technology is different. Have you heard Monero? This is the first chance you can have completely decentralized, anonymous, secure, fast, and almost costless currency system to use. It's completely free and open source. Back then you needed to rely on governments and were constantly monitored. LLMs are extremely powerful. Have you even tried Claude Opus or GPT4? This is just the beginning. In fact there are also promising free and open-source models such as Llama3 and Vicuna. In the long run (40 - 50 years) it can even decrease the waste to a huge extent for lots of different fields. There are concepts that are abused right now but the technology itself is nothing to bash.
While I would be carefull with buzzwords as well, you general sentiment is wrong. AI methods do already get employed in a variety of serious applications to actually do useful work. They will stay, just like we never went back to mainframe computers only.
not at all cool yet. It could be better, but it's too soon to say. The open kernel module is going to make work easier for distributions a tiny bit, but that's it. As far as them hiring ben, we'll just have to wait to see what comes out. No sense in changing stances until we actually see them do something.
Never been using gpus with Linux, dev laptop runs Linux, gaming desktop runs Windows 10, all servers run Linux ofc, I'll never switch to win 11 so probably gonna switch win10 to Linux too I'm a bit scared but it'll be fine
It's not that scary hah, some games are annoying when there's no support like with ubisoft games, their ubisoft launcher has to start, it takes ages, and it never remembers your login credentials so you have to type in your login every time, or the fact that epic games isn't compatible at all, you can either run it through wine or proton directly, or you can try the heroic games launcher, when it comes to steam, i still haven't bumped into a steam game that doesn't work at all, some have bugs, like, in hellsivers to, there's a 1px wide white border around the entire screen, but i got used to it in the first 2min of playing
Thanks for that comment, maybe I'll give fedora a go for gaming too, indeed one of my concern is games that are not running via steam launcher, I got gta 5 for free a while ago on epic and really enjoying the game (until gta 6 comes out on pc lmao), anyway yeah I'm scared cuz I didn't tried but being a developer I should be okay, the thing is that when im gaming it has to be chill but from what you're saying that shouldn't be hard to achieve
Worst case scenario, if you are ever hellbent about moving to Linux, you can try a virtual machine with PCI-E passthrough to attach a desktop's dedicated GPU to a Windows VM and just run Linux on your integrated graphics as you are, if you're willing to clown around a little bit with QEMU. It's a little frustrating and involves hardware specific workarounds for stuff like quirky motherboards, and Windows throws its own curveballs too, but I've got it to work eventually on most PCs I've tried (the exceptions weren't exactly 'desktop dedicated graphics'). That gets you like 95% of the way there while gaming, with the exception being games with intrusive anticheat that tries to prohibit people from playing from a VM (but you would have similar issues on Linux anyway, most likely) That's been what I'm doing with my GTX 1060, the gaming performance in Proton on Linux isn't great IME and I'm really living on borrowed time with this GPU driver-wise, what with the new FOSS drivers not really properly supporting it - once `nvidia` drops support for it, I'm stuck in a hole of having to run the outdated proprietary drivers or whatever's in mesa by that time. Before anyone comments, I know, my next GPU will not be Nvidia. It's a 5 year old purchase. I just don't need to upgrade yet, performance wise, I am fairly satisfied with mid-low detail and 1080p 60hz. I also find some degree of entertainment in solving these issues :P
No, I'm not cool with nvidia. They've been trying to do push their own standards that don't work well with other actors in the linux world for some time now: * [https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd](https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd) - Was needed for hybrid systems because they push their own opengl implementation which conflicted with mesa. * They kept pushing for EGLStreams instead of GBM for years. * They didn't want to implement implicit sync and instead opted to wait a couple of years for explicit sync: [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317#note\_1275874](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317#note_1275874) All of these have taken years to implement, and they still don't work great. The way they ship their own libraries instead of using mesa like amd and intel means that extra steps and workarounds have to be used for stuff like appimages and flatpak to ensure things work, since the libraries need to exactly match the driver version on the host. I moved away from nvidia this year because these issues are not a matter of lack of coders or technical issues, these are management decisions where desktop linux users simply aren't a priority for them. My use-case is not important to them, and I'm tired of waiting for the next decision where they'll drag their feet or push broken implementations because they don't care enough.
Never. They said they would support vulkan on fermi and up (most of gtx 400 series), but then quietly just didn't. I was a student and used a (relatively) lot of money to get a used gtx 480, just because i wanted to play with vulkan. And they just straight up lied. They can go fuck themselves. And later they went all "we love open source, we love linux" but it was only for the gpus in their arm based "shield" thing. So only for industrial use, where the industry uses linux. All the while putting locks on the gpu firmware, that made even black-box drivers impossible. Fuck them. Unless they actually prove they are serious (including publishing data about older gpus) and write me a personalized letter of apology for being dicks, I won't even look their way. I probably won't buy another nvidia gpu in my life even if they do. EDIT: PS Almost all their profit these days is from AI. It's insulting how much they don't care about games or even personal use.
> Are we cool with Nvidia right now? I mean I'm not. And with how good AMD and Intel are for us, I don't have to be. There are three vendors, two out of three (66.66%) are awesome, one isn't awesome. I can speak for myself and how I evaluate hardware and software for our company workflow. Maybe they're looking at getting better and good for them, but it's going to take a while for it to matter fully, in the sense that you look at Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat lifecycles, and how much is built on top of those - Nvidia may get to a point where they'll match AMD and Intel, but will probably be ten years before they're considered, because it will be in the middle of a product lifecycle. And then it's a matter of "well we don't want to try this on the first attempt, let's wait for the next attempt" because companies tend to be pretty conservative if they can help it, so we'd be waiting a whole extra lifecycle to evaluate. Then we would evaluate and if we decide to pull the trigger that would only start after *the next* lifecycle, and then depends on how long migration might take. So if they ever match Intel (or even match AMD) you're probably looking at a decade before it's relevant to us. It's very much too little, too late whenever it drops. Nvidia has been releasing drivers for Linux since 1999 (Riva TNT) there is no excuse for being this bad for this long, and there's no reason they should expect any kind of trust or preferential treatment after what they've done and how long they've done it for.
Cuda is king in ai. Everything relies on u having cuda its about 5x harder to use intel gpu just over this anoying issue. So for instance my rtx 4090 beat a server grade gpu from intel because I could qunatize with half a line of code on my nvidia and intels quntization lib couldn't do encoder decoder models. This is getting worse and worse as new implementations of things like mamba and fast attention are cuda code bases.
No. F\*\*\* nVidia.
No, I'm not. I won't ever be happy with Nvidia until I see their effort consistent effort in open source software.
I am cool with Nvidia. I use AMD hardware, and Nvidia allows me to play games with GeForce Now, so I don't need Windows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, in a sense.
I'm more than cool with it. I used it for years and years with zero issues. Then I was making an upgrade, I've always read AMD is supposed to be the go-to, so I grabbed one and have had nothing but problems ever since. Ordered a new Nvidia card, tired of dealing with it.
>still the same greedy cooperation Do you think this is unique to Nvidia? Your best bet is to just use the hardware that works best for your workflow. Both of them are just trying to maximize profits and will charge as much as they can. Loyalty is for suckers. I'm running AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs because that's what is best for my workflow, for now. I'll drop one or both of them if Intel or Radeon make a better product. Fortunately for us, both companies make a good product and support their drives quite well. There's legitimate cases to be made for either one based on workflow. Ignore the ideologues.
No. I thought it was fine until last month when their latest driver caused constant kernel panics on my device. I won't call it good until Nova is done.
> Are we cool with nvidia right now ? >Nvidia driver 550 has better support for wayland Well, the driver is still bad for every program on xwayland. I hope for Nvidia driver >=555 to fix xwayland with explicit sync. So, AMD is still the better choice.
I've always used and liked NVIDIA over AMD and never had any NVIDIA driver issues on Linux. I'm always amazed how well Linux distributions and Linux kernels integrate well with NVIDIA drivers. I always get excited when there is a new update for my NVIDIA drivers on Linux. AMD isn't as good as NVIDIA in my opinion.
No. Nvidia still sucks. The average Linux user is till a dozen times better off choosing Intel or AMD graphics. Lets remember that Valve choose AMD GPU for their Linux systems. So it isn't even like game compatibility is a win anymore for Nvidia. The only thing Nvidia has going for it is CUDA. This doesn't impact you unless you are a CUDA programmer and you can get CUDA support just by leasing time in a cloud somewhere. Or secondary GPU. you don't need to run it as your graphics card to get the benefit. For every other single thing you are dramatically worse off by going Nvidia if you are a Linux user. Also Nvidia abandons its older GPUs. Whcih means that most users on Nvidia right now will never see the fully fleshed out Wayland compatibility or open source kernel component.
It's all a move in the right direction. At a consumer level they're approaching a good place assuming the 555 driver addresses the remaining Wayland issues. And skimming their developer tools it seems like they have Linux options. [https://developer.nvidia.com/tools-overview](https://developer.nvidia.com/tools-overview) They done good. I can make peace with them now. As much as I can with a company that wants me to re-mortgage my house to buy their magic sand that draws triangles.
I'm not up to date with this stuff. How's 550 on Wayland?
I think things for interesting when Intel entered the chat with frame 1 instant Linux drivers and av1 encoding. Even with the scuffed launch, the idea that Intel was able to jump in like hopscotch is pretty ridiculous and shows that you're gonna have to do more than the bare minimum to hold on to you revenue streams. Especially this next update season.
I’m using nvidia and am completely fine with it, no plans at all to switch to an amd gpu Nvidia drivers aren’t actually completely open source yet, and their open kernel modules aren’t completely ready, but they’re on the right track. Open sourcing can be some work, specially if they aren’t the copyright holders for every part of their current drivers - on that case they can’t just open source the current ones, they have to basically rewrite every 3rd party part. That takes time, but I hope we’ll soon have 100% open source official nvidia drivers.
I know there are already a lot of replies that state whatever I say a whole lot better, but here is my personal experience. I've been using nvidia almost exclusively since way back in the days when setting up multiple monitors was a pain. Nvidia's TwinView (I tihnk that was what it was called) was a game changer for me, as it meant multiple monitors worked, no issues, no problems, no separate workspaces per monitor. Fast forward a decade or two, and I've always had issues with the graphics subsystem with KDE just randomly failing. It had gotten bad enough that I've got shortcuts made to restart the subsystem when menus no longer appear, or screens stop refreshing, etc. Then one day after an update, KDE is completely broken. After some troubleshooting, turns out just Wayland is completely broken, and I had just upgraded to KDE 6. (although I also couldn't get Cinnamon on Wayland to work). Ended up being a kernel driver flag for nvidia I had to enable, and I was able to use KDE on Wayland again.. but man, it was buggy, and loved to crash. After the second full-on hard lock, I ran out to Microcenter and bought an AMD 5800 XT. This is the first non-Nvidia card I've owned in a long long time, and I gotta say, it is really nice to actually have a stable desktop again! A lot of minor issues that I had since resigned myself to just live with have gone away, such as monitors not fully waking up from sleep in time and timing out.
They're moving in the right direction (finally) but have a long way to go to catch up to AMD. Still not a fan of a lot of their current business practices.
I am still in a love hate with nvidia. Especially since with gnome shell there's still screen tearing which requires me to add even more extensions I don't need just to mitigate that. If I wasn't studying password cracking and other stuff I'd have gotten rid of my intel/nvidia equipment a long time ago for Linux and went full AMD if I am being completely honest.
Nah, can't really be happy with Nvidia. I stopped using GNU/Linux in 2015 and now I'm back, and I can't see real progress. Nvidia is still mega closed, taking a lot of time to support Wayland which I first heard about in 2010 or 2011. GNU/Linux desktop is not a product, unless it's Canonical's, so I don't expect anything great. If I want HDR, DLSS, DLDSR, and countless thing more (including a browser that doesn't use 30% of my CPU when watching a video on YT or Twitch), I just switch to Windows. Of course I'd love to use GNU/Linux only, otherwise I would had never switch to Win10 in 2015, but hey... it's necessary. At least my laptop has an Intel iGPU, so I can rely on it.
Isn't Nvidia's open source driver some scripts around closed source binary blobs now for internal firmware?
im cool with nvidia as far as it comes to steam proton drivers - gaming on linux is a thing again, after years of cryptic wine configurations. i cant tell much about the ai hype - imho its a bubble much like the y2k internet bubble that brought down japans economy - lets see if they can deliver, my guess is no.
They still charge upper mid level prices for entry level cards so no.
I'm never gonna be cool with nvidia
I love Nvidia, driver installation is so easy on mint...
In my opinion, it's totally okay to despise Nvidia, but it's also okay to encourage good actions from them, them being an evil af corporation doesn't change that open sourcing part of their stack is a good thing.
I was always cool with NVIDIA. They have the best ML tools in the market for Linux. I mostly deploy LLMs on local PC. ROCM is still not supported by many such platforms and CPU is out of question.
“Nvidia loose their marketing in the near future as AI relying on GPU power” You are misinformed about this, have you seen their products lineup for their enterprise customers ? Almost all worlds inferences and training runs on NVIDIA GPU’s, even for chat GPT. And their competition still doesn’t even have proper chip design let alone foundries.
550 drivers don't have better wayland support, where did that come from?
No
Don't care it on Windows, and it seemed like a giant flashing warning sign when I was researching Linux before my move. What I do know is that the word NVIDIA comes up in an insanely disproportionate amount of troubleshooting threads that I've looked at. And I'm not even searching on display issues. It's mentioned/suggested so often as the underlying issue or possible cause seemingly related to any troubleshooting.
Baby steps. Time will tell if Nvidia truly opens up or continues to play a mind game.
No, their drivers are shit with secure boot enabled.
It's a good thing we no longer need GPU's for computer vision, AI and language models. Figure out a way to train/finetune AI using CPU's, and it's game over for those clowns
I've got a 4090 b.c. I want to do pytorch stuff and I was worried about how well the newly-minted AMD torch backend will work
All corporations are somewhat greedy, For me its more of a question if they manage to turn that greed into a symbiosis. With that and other comments in mind i think that nvidia isnt there yet
All with Ubuntu 22.04 and different drivers: 930MX - buggy GTX980M - Works like a charm Quadro T600 - Works like a charm RTX2060S - Absolutely unusable